Rough Draft

by James W. Hall

“Guns are unnatural. I’ve never used one. Not knives either. Both of them are inhumane.”

  Misty lay back against the pillow.

  “I would think, I mean, just as a philosophical point, if you wanted to kill somebody, a bullet in the brain would be fairly humane. It’s like a second or two and it’s over. That doesn’t seem as bad to me as knives. You stick somebody with a blade, they could take an hour to die, bleeding to death. Flopping around. Jesus, now that’s seriously inhumane.”

  “I use my hand,” he said. “This one.”

  He held up his right hand for her to see. Turned it in the light like he’d just washed it and was letting it dry.

  “You strangle your victims?”

  “At first, yes.”

  “At first?”

  “After they’ve blacked out, I reach inside.”

  “Reach inside their mouths? I don’t get it.”

  “No,” he said, “inside their chests.”

  “Jesus. You can stop right there. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

  “When I’m inside their chests, that’s when I crush their heart.”

  Misty closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the guy was still there, still with his hand up in the air, looking at it.

  “Oh, yeah, well, that’s real humane. Crushing hearts.” The man lowered his hand.

  “More humane than guns,” he said.

  “But you got to cut them open, right? You still need a knife.”

  “No,” he said. “I use this.”

  He offered her his right hand and after a second’s hesitation, she reached up and felt around until she came to his thumbnail. It was long and hard, filed down to a sharp point. A claw.

  Misty swallowed. She took a long breath, then let go of his hand. It was cold and slick, that marble feeling again. Or maybe a reptile, some big thick snake that has to lie in the sun all day just to heat its blood to room temperature.

  “Look, why the fuck are you telling me this shit?”

  “Because you asked me.”

  “All right,” Misty said. “Now look. Number one, I don’t know where my old man is. If I did, I’d tell you in a flash. I would. I don’t have any love for the fucker, believe me. And, number two, I haven’t gotten a good look at you in the dark. So there’s no reason you have to kill me. I couldn’t identify you. Even if I did call the cops, which I’m not going to do. So if you’re worried about doing the humane thing, well, it seems pretty clear to me that the humane thing in this instance is just to leave me alone. Go on your merry way.”

  “What are you planning to do to Hannah Keller?”

  “Man, you don’t listen, do you? A person could make the best speech in the world, talk the birds down from the trees, but with you, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got some kind of hearing dysfunction or something.”

  “You hate her. So you want to hurt her somehow. How are you going to hurt her?”

  Misty lay there for a few moments wondering what to do. Just when she thought she was making headway, getting some connection going with the guy, bang, it’s like nothing happened between them at all. Very shaky ground.

  “That thing you got,” Misty said. “That’s a computer, right? You’re on the Web?”

  “The Internet.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll show you what I’m planning to do to Hannah Keller.”

  She told him what to type in.

  He used his first finger, pecking slowly, and entered the address. It took a few seconds to log on to the site.

  She sat up and watched the screen with him.

  When the page finally loaded, there were frogs perched on floating logs in the middle of a lagoon. They were snapping flies out of the air. Some of them were swimming past lily pads, their long froggy legs snapping through the water.

  “What is this?”

  “That’s her kid,” Misty said. “That’s his Web page.”

  “Hannah Keller’s boy.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Frogs on logs,” he said.

  “That’s just what it is this week. He changes it a lot. He’s a computer whiz, a smart little boy.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “It’s right there, at the top. Randall’s World. His name is Randall.”

  “What are you going to do to Hannah Keller?”

  “Okay,” she said. Going to give it another try. What did she have to lose, tell him everything, maybe that would do it, he’d leave. “I’ve been chatting up her kid, you know, over the computer. E-mail, instant messages. Seducing him, sort of. We’re getting pretty close. One of these days, I’m going to bump into him somewhere. The mall, or on the way home from school. I’ll let him know it’s me, the girl he’s been talking to. Girl who’s been sending him pictures of herself. You know, sexually suggestive, showing a little skin, but keeping the face hidden. And then, what I was thinking, I’ll talk the little guy into my car, and Randall and I’ll drive off together. Disappear somewhere. Maybe go out west, California. I haven’t thought out that part yet.”

  “You’re going to kidnap her son.”

  “That’s right. I’m going to steal her goddamn precious little boy.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m not?”

  He was quiet for several moments. He was watching the frogs swim. Watching the long tongues unfurl and snap the flies from the air.

  “You won’t do anything until I’ve told you it’s okay.”

  “All right,” she said. “Okay, sure. I can live with that.”

  “You’ll do nothing.”

  “Sure, sure. Hold off a while. No problem, you don’t want me messing up your plan, whatever the hell it is. I can see that.”

  The man snapped the tiny computer shut. He stood there a minute looking down at her. Breathing through his mouth.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said.

  Misty smoothed a hand over her sore breast.

  “Inconvenience? What? Breaking into my apartment, torturing my tit? I’d say that’s a little more than a fucking inconvenience.”

  He looked at her for a few more moments. Not moving, just that slow breath through his mouth.

  “You ever been in a magazine, Misty? Your picture?”

  “What?”

  “I think you could be in a magazine. You have the right nose. The eyes.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes. You could be in a magazine.”

  “That’s nice of you to say,” she said. “That’s sweet.”

  “And what is that?” he said. Motioning up toward her wall.

  “Oh, that,” Misty said. “It’s one of my art sculptures.”

  Mounted on the wall a few feet over her bed was the crucifix Barbie. On a big brass cross Misty had glued a naked Barbie doll. In one of Barbie’s hands was a miniature hair dryer, in the other was a derringer. She’d glued a triangle of green shag carpet to Barbie’s crotch for pubic hair. There were five other sculptures on the other walls, hidden in the darkness. Her avant-garde phase.

  “You are an artist?” the man asked.

  “I used to be. I gave it up. Moved on to other things.”

  “I don’t understand art,” he said. “It’s one of the things I don’t understand.”

  “Well, you’re not alone,” Misty said. “I don’t understand it either. It’s just something I used to do. I glued a bunch of shit together and hung it on the wall. It pissed off my mother, pissed off my teachers, so I kept on doing it.”

  The man stared at her Barbie crucifix. He wasn’t real tall. Wide shoulders, narrow waist, a slow, measured way about his movements like he thought everything through before he did it. He looked down at her again.

  “From now on, Misty, you can call me by my name.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  “Hal,” he said.

  She pushed herself up onto her elbows, rubbed her eyes, and squinted up at him for a better look.

  “Hal what?”r />
  But he had already stepped backward into the shadows and was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  “No, Sheffield. It’s absolutely out of the question.”

  Helen had her back to him, staring out the bank of windows that faced Biscayne Bay. It was ten to eight, Tuesday morning, hour thirty-two of Operation Joanie. One-third of the way. No sightings yet, no scent in the air. Everyone a little frayed. Out the windows it was a gray morning, the sun muffled behind low leaden clouds. In the distance the bay stretched before them like a platter of badly tarnished silver.

  Helen wore a pair of khaki trousers and a blue-and-white-striped shirt, sleeves rolled up to her forearms. Her hair was fastened back with some sort of spring-loaded plastic clamp that looked like it doubled as a torture device. No counterfeit smiles this morning. The air around her was dense with bitter fumes.

  “I told Hannah I’d meet her at eight-thirty at the Bayshore address.”

  “I don’t care what you told her, Sheffield. You’re not doing it. No way in hell. Tell him, Charlie.”

  Senator Ackerman was in the kitchen pouring himself another cup of coffee. Charlie Pettigrew sat on the gray leather couch, a mug balanced on his lap. In the master bedroom, hunched in front of an oversized computer monitor, Andy Barth tapped keys and fidgeted. Frank could see on the screen a color-coded street map of Dade County, Hannah’s car was a glowing red dot. The other agents were green. A dozen of them moving in and out of contact with Hannah’s car.

  “She’s approaching Pinecrest Middle School. Two blocks east,” Andy called through the open doorway. He was wearing red walking shorts and a yellow tennis shirt, purple flip-flops. Trying for Miami-hot-and-flashy, but getting world-class geeky instead.

  Charlie Pettigrew had a sip of his coffee and set it on the end table.

  “Why’d you do this, Frank? What were you thinking?”

  “Charlie, I didn’t do anything. She came to me.”

  “But you agreed to participate. Why, Frank?”

  “This blows the whole scenario, Sheffield,” Helen said, turning her head, speaking over her shoulder. “Was that your intention, to queer the operation?”

  The senator wandered back into the living room blowing on his coffee.

  “Nothing’s happened,” Ackerman said. “I think both of you need to calm down. If Hal was following the Keller woman last night and witnessed her meeting with an FBI agent, he would probably see it as perfectly normal.”

  “It wasn’t in the script,” Shane said.

  “Well, maybe it should’ve been,” said Frank. “Maybe you didn’t design this as flawlessly as you thought.”

  Helen swung around, her lips drawn back, quivering on the edge of a snarl. The air around her was so combustible a stray electron could set it off.

  “Do the two of you have some kind of problem I should be aware of?” Ackerman said. “This rancor.”

  Shane got control of her mouth, shook her head.

  “A disagreement on strategy, Senator,” she said. “Nothing more.”

  She moved out of the harsh gray light from the window and perched stiffly on the arm of one of the leather chairs. Bluish shadows were showing in the hollows beneath her eyes. Her raccoon genes starting to emerge.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Ackerman said. “Because I’d hate to see dissension in the ranks sidetrack us from our mission.”

  “Look,” Frank said. “In the first place, Hal Bonner can’t possibly know every damn FBI agent in the U.S. on sight. I’m in plainclothes, I could be anybody. And let’s say he does make me, he asks around, finds out what I do. What’s the harm? Like the senator says, it’s perfectly predictable Hannah would seek me out and that I’d accompany her. It’d be more suspicious if she went in there alone.”

  “No,” Shane said. “Absolutely not. You’ll scare him off, the whole plan is jeopardized.”

  “My vote’s with Frank,” Ackerman said. “I think he has a valid point. He goes to the Bayshore address. Then afterward he drops away. It looks better that way. More natural. Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t think of using someone like Sheffield in the original plan, Ms. Shane.”

  “She’s dropped the kid off at school, now she’s circling back toward Old Cutler Road,” Andy Barth called out. “Estimated ETA is eight twenty-eight. Traffic thickening ahead of her.”

  “Anything following?” Shane said. She was staring at the marble floor.

  “Far as I can tell, only our people,” said Andy. “But it’s rush hour, it’s hard to be sure.”

  Frank stood up, checked his watch.

  “I’ll get going, then.”

  Helen’s glance was poisonous. She gave the senator a taste of it.

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “Not one bit.”

  “So noted, Ms. Shane,” said Ackerman. “But let’s not forget Joanie, shall we? That’s who this is all about. Not you, not Sheffield, not me. None of us. It’s not about scoring points, it’s about my daughter. What happened to Joanie Lynn Ackerman out on that snow-covered mountain slope.”

  Everyone stood in place, a moment of silence for Joanie, and for the senator’s staggering, unrelenting grief, then Charlie Pettigrew stepped forward, put his hand on Frank’s shoulder, and steered toward the door of the apartment, then down the hall to the elevator. He jabbed the button and gave Sheffield a hard stare.

  “Okay, so what’s really going on, Frank? Between you and Shane.”

  “We haven’t exactly bonded.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Fact is, we’re working on a pretty good personality clash. She came by my place last night, started talking trash about my dad. I threw some back at her and it got testy.”

  “Well, get over it, whatever it is. There’s too much riding on this operation for a bunch of schoolyard name-calling. That clear, Frank?”

  Sheffield nodded. He watched the elevator numbers count upward toward their floor.

  “Senator’s got a tight grip on your short hairs too, huh, Charlie?”

  “Damn right he does. And he’s got Director Kelly too. If we don’t nail this asshole soon, believe me, a lot of (ticks are going to get seriously shortened. And believe me, Frank, at this stage in life I can’t spare an extra inch.”

  The doors slid open. Charlie Pettigrew reached out and held them wide. Randy Sanderson and Ronald Scruggs stepped off. His colleagues from the Miami field office, head-of-the-class poster-boys, there for a briefing. They nodded to Charlie Pettigrew, and both of them gave Frank a quick once-over. What the hell was this fuckoff doing with the big boys?

  “Hey, Randy. Hey, Ron.”

  They made their curt hellos and walked on toward the suite.

  “It’s okay, guys, don’t worry,” Frank called. “Only reason they invited me along is for comic relief.”

  They shook their heads and kept on going.

  “Look, Frank,” Charlie said. “No more screwing around. Play this straight, okay? For old times’ sake if nothing else.”

  Frank stepped aboard. Gave him the same two-fingered salute he’d used last night. Starting to like the gesture. Echoes of Bogart. Maybe he’d keep it in the repertoire.

  On the way down he checked himself out in the mirrored stainless steel. He’d taken a little longer than usual dressing this morning. The tan slacks without the pleats, the Bass loafers, the black polo shirt. No jewelry, a light mist of some Ralph Lauren aftershave one of the secretaries had given him last Christmas. He hadn’t used cologne in a decade. Not since he was courting his ex-wife. Only woman he’d ever met who actually liked Old Spice, which should have told him something right there if he’d been paying attention.

  He got a quick ride to the lobby and stepped out into the marble luxury of the Grand Bay Hotel. Lots of mirrors, lots of tall, slender beautiful people reflected in them. And whatever minor confidence in his appearance he’d enjoyed while looking at his stainless steel reflection, departed in a sudden rush.

  This stretch of Bayshore Drive
was filled with dignified old mansions built up high on the limestone and coral ridgeline. Most of the houses had large open porches and heavy tapered columns, staid, prosaic residences, more like something you’d find in a Chicago suburb than a neighborhood on the edge of a subtropical bay. When they’d been built, about the time Hannah’s parents were born, there were no marinas or restaurants or condos across the narrow highway which meandered before them along the coastline. Back then, in the thirties, these homes had sweeping and unobstructed views of a bay as blue and pristine as a Tahitian lagoon.

  But in the last few decades the nearby village of Coconut Grove had swollen into a chic and noisy metropolitan center, a playground for feral teens and South American tourists. The narrow coast road had been widened to four lanes and a stream of cars and throbbing motorcycles passed at every hour of the day and night. All week long the Grove’s clubs and bars raved till dawn, so these elegant houses that had once presided over a wide and tranquil panorama now looked down on the blue haze of ceaseless Miami traffic, and what had once been a treasured address in the city was simply a row of faded villas with the moldy look of nursing homes for the dispossessed.

  Hannah drove slowly, counting down the numbers until she spotted the address and swung her car onto the shoulder of the road. The house she was looking for was a faded pink stucco affair with two large dormer windows and a bleached-out red barrel tile roof. Its open porch ran the length of the front, and like its neighbors it was perched atop the high limestone crest. Craggy fissures of rock showed through the grass near the roadway. Sprawling oaks and banyans shaded the yard and obscured a large portion of the house. To the west a steep asphalt driveway mounted the bluff, then disappeared from view up on the plateau where the house stood.

  She made a U-turn, cut sharply into the entrance, and held it in low gear as she rumbled up the steep asphalt drive. Frank Sheffield was already there, leaning against the door of a green Miata parked in the shade of an oak to the side of the house. His convertible top was down.

  Hannah drew in behind him and turned off the engine.

  As Frank approached, Hannah reached back into the jump seat and gripped her black leather bag. A few pounds heavier than usual, because of the loaded .357 Smith & Wesson in its suede holster. She hadn’t handled the pistol for five years, not since that morning when she placed it on a high shelf in her bedroom closet. It had been her father’s gun, the weapon he’d chosen that morning when the killers broke into his house, the unfired pistol Ed Keller was holding when he was killed.